East Baton Rouge Parish School System Superintendent Bernard Taylor has told White that he plans to provide more information about the district’s ideas in the hopes that White will reconsider, Baton Rouge School Board member Craig Freeman said Friday.

As part of a broader reorganization of schools across the district, the School Board voted this spring to turn Mayfair Middle School into a lab school, following the model of Louisiana State University’s lab school. The board also voted to close Delmont Elementary as an elementary school and turn it into a preK and kindergarten center.

White denied those changes in a letter Thursday, saying that Taylor and the board are making the changes solely to avoid the state taking over the schools. “The proposed plan includes nothing regarding improvement for students affected and instead forcibly moves hundreds of them to different school sites with no guarantee of admission to a school with a strong track record,” White wrote.

Regardless of whether the programs change at those schools, White said in his letter that the state will look at the schools’ scores this fall and could take them over if they receive a letter grade of “F.”

School district lawyer Domoine Rutledge did not respond to requests for comments Friday.

But Freeman said Taylor has been emailing back and forth with White, and plans to submit more information to the state Department of Education.

In a follow-up letter Friday afternoon, White told Taylor: “We are of course open to considering further information and thank you for offering it.”

Freeman said he was surprised by the state’s decision. He questioned why the state would not support the move to change Mayfair to a laboratory school, particularly since Gov. Bobby’s Jindal children attend the LSU lab school that it would be based on.

Freeman also said the children who would be moved out of Delmont and Mayfair would attend better-ranked schools in the district.

“These are two situations that I think are exactly what we need to do,” Freeman said. “I don’t think we need to lock kids in a failing school for another year because of some state rule.”

School Board member Jerry Arbour also sent an email to White on Thursday, suggesting that the school district move Mayfair to the Town South Shopping Center, a strip mall where the district is planning to house an alternative school. Keeping control over the traditional school buildings is a key concern for the East Baton Rouge district, and Arbour referred to it in his email.

“Let the state decide if they want to take over the school and the lease of that location (at the strip mall),” he wrote.

White responded to the suggestion in his letter, saying, “I wanted you to be aware in advance that we do not consider this relocation of the (sic) Mayfair to a strip mall to be an acceptable plan.”